The ChangingMinds Blog!

Expression, emotion and botox

What makes you happy? Well, there's lots of things you can do and think about
to cheer yourself up and make yourself smile, but did you know that it works
backwards too. Just smiling, even when you don't feel like it, is enough to
actually make you feel better.

This emotive reversal is a principle that was noticed over 100 years ago by
psychologist William James. Even Charles Darwin had a 'facial feedback
hypothesis' about it.

A question that perplexed researcher Andreas Hennenlotter was whether it is
the facial movement that triggers the emotion or the neural thought to
physically smile that also fires off the happy feeling. Hennenlotter came up
with the solution of using women who had been given Botox injections for
cosmetic purposes. Botox is a toxin that paralyses muscles, with the aesthetic
result that wrinkles are not allowed to be created.

38 women had their brains scanned before and after Botox injections while
they imitated pictures of sad or angry facial expressions. Imitating an angry or
sad facial expression led to increased activity in all subjects, in both left
and right of the emotion-focused amygdala, though for angry expressions,
activity in the left amygdala was lower in the women who had received Botox.
This indicates that jiust pulling an angry expression without actually being
angry has an effect on the amygdala and likely also emotions.

There was no difference between groups iwhen they pulled sad facial
expressions, but there were differences in orbitofrontal cortex activity, which
is involved in evaluating the emotion of touch signals.

The bottom line is neural support for Darwin's and James' theory, that just
forcing an emotional expression can lead to feeling the associated emotion. You
can do the experiment yourself. Just smile when you are feeling neutral or a bit
down and see how much happier you become.

I also wonder if this could become a skill. With practice, can you more
easily make yourself happy just by smiling? And could you stop feeling so sad by
keeping a straight face? And who could you help by teaching these skills?